Is my data gone for good?

Q. My mother spilled some juice on her year old Macbook Pro and fried the logic board. They told her at the Apple Store that to fix it would require sending it to California and they couldn’t guarantee that her data wouldn’t be lost. Do you think there is any hope?

The good news is that even though your motherboard is toast, there’s a very good chance your mother’s data is still intact. When a computer system board is goes bad, either from a simple system failure or from an outside force like juice spillage or even an electrical surge, the hard drive usually isn’t affected. I’ve worked with many “dead” computers over the years and in almost every case the hard drive was just fine.

This means that by either replacing the failed components or even just removing the hard drive and connecting it to another computer the files should be accessible and recoverable.

Since the laptop is only a year old I think it would be worth it to have it repaired. Just be sure you are very clear with Apple that you want them to attempt to recover the data and not just wipe the drive clean. If you decide you don’t want to have the computer repaired and just want to see if you can save the data then I would just consult a local technician to see about having this done.